How to swap JSON Writes Converter for Play controller Action

Question

I've built a microservice using Scala and Play and now I need to create a new version of the service that returns the same data as the previous version of the service but in a different JSON format. The service currently uses implicit Writes converters to do this. My controller looks something like this, where MyJsonWrites contains the implicit definitions.

class MyController extends Controller with MyJsonWrites {
  def myAction(query: String) = Action.async {
      getData(query).map {
        results =>
          Ok(Json.toJson(results))
      }
  }
}

trait MyJsonWrites {
    implicit val writes1: Writes[SomeDataType]
    implicit val writes2: Writes[SomeOtherDataType]
    ...
}

Now I need a new version of myAction where the JSON is formatted differently. The first attempt I made was to make MyController a base class and have subclasses extend it with their own trait that has the implicit values. Something like this.

class MyNewContoller extends MyController with MyNewJsonWrites

This doesn't work though because the implicit values defined on MyNewJsonWrites are not available in the methods of the super class.

It would be ideal if I could just create a new action on the controller that somehow used the converters defined in MyNewJsonWrites. Sure, I could change the trait to an object and import the implicit values in each method but then I'd have to duplicate the method body of myAction so that the implicits are in scope when I call Json.toJson. I don't want to pass them as implicit parameters to a base method because there are too many of them. I guess I could pass a method as a parameter to the base method that actually does the imports and Json.toJson call. Something like this. I just thought maybe there'd be a better way.

  def myBaseAction(query: String, toJson: Seq[MyResultType] => JsValue) = Action.async {
      getData(query).map {
        results =>
          Ok(Json.toJson(results))
      }
  }

def myActionV1(query: String) = {
    def toJson(results: Seq[MyResultType]) = {
        import MyJsonWritesV2._
        Json.toJson(results)
    }
    myBaseAction(query, toJson)
}

vdebergue vdebergue · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-13T08:23:30

Instead of relying on scala implicit resolution, you can call your writes directly:

def myBaseAction(query: String, writes: Writes[MyResultType]) = Action.async {
  getData(query).map { results =>
    val seqWrites: Writes[Seq[MyResultType]] = Writes.seq(writes)
    Ok(seqWrites.writes(results))
  }
}

def myActionV1(query: String) = myBaseAction(query, MyJsonWritesV1)
def myActionV2(query: String) = myBaseAction(query, MyJsonWritesV2)

How to swap JSON Writes Converter for Play controller Action

1 Answers